The BBC has urged a court to dismiss President Trump’s multi-billion lawsuit against it. The defamation lawsuit centers on a Panorama episode that spliced different sections of Trump’s speech on January 6, 2021.
“It wasn’t available to watch in the US on iPlayer, online or any other streaming platforms,” a BBC spokesperson said this week. “We have therefore challenged jurisdiction of the Florida court.”
According to the network’s court documents, the BBC argued that the Florida court lacks “personal jurisdiction” over the case. “The BBC has never made the documentary available on BritBox, BBC.com, or any other distribution platform available in the US,” the filing states. “Defendants did not advertise it in Florida.”
“The BBC prohibits the unauthorised use of VPNs to watch iPlayer from outside the UK and takes active steps to enforce this ban,” the documents add, going on to assert that “no third-party distributor aired the documentary in the US.”
President Trump accused the BBC in December of making a “false, defamatory, deceptive, disparaging, inflammatory, and malicious depiction” of him that was “fabricated and aired by the Defendants one week before the 2024 Presidential Election in a brazen attempt to interfere in and influence the Election’s outcome” to his detriment.
Doctoring Trump’s speech, “in the form of distortion of meaning and splicing of entirely unrelated word sequence,” the lawsuit says, “is part of the BBC’s longstanding pattern of manipulating President Trump’s speeches and presenting content in a misleading manner in order to defame him, including fabricating calls for violence that he never made.”
In February, a judge allowed President Trump’s lawsuit to proceed.
